Commvault boosts Active Directory recovery speed

Commvault, a pioneering provider of cyber resilience and data protection solutions for the hybrid cloud, introduced an expansion of its platform to provide full and automated forest recovery for the world’s most widely used enterprise identity and access solution, Microsoft Active Directory.  

As organisations continue to combat non-stop cyberattacks and threats, Commvault® Cloud Backup & Recovery for Active Directory Enterprise Edition is the latest addition to the Commvault Cloud platform, which already protects a vast array of workloads and is designed to keep customers resilient, operational, and in a state of continuous business.  

Physical building access

Bad actors know this all well, which is why they make Active Directory a target in up to nine out of 10 cyberattacks

Active Directory, often called the “backbone of enterprise IT,” manages authentication for more than 610 million users worldwide and controls access to critical business systems, protecting everything from workstation logins to physical building access. If Active Directory goes offline, business operations can come to a halt.

Bad actors know this all too well, which is why they make Active Directory a primary target in up to 9 out of 10 cyberattacks. When disaster strikes, recovering Active Directory is vital, yet traditionally has been very hard to do, requiring intricate, time-consuming, manual processes, as described by Microsoft’s Forest Recovery Guide.

New level of resilience to Active Directory

Commvault is changing this with Backup & Recovery for Active Directory Enterprise Edition. It brings a new level of resilience to Active Directory by enabling automated, rapid recovery of the Active Directory forest, which includes users, groups, permissions, and domain controllers across the organisation. 

This new offering eliminates slow and error-prone manual processes often associated with Active Directory forest recoveries. With Backup & Recovery for Active Directory Enterprise Edition, enterprises will be able to:

• Make Active Directory recovery a snap via automated runbooks: Automated forest recovery runbooks streamline the multi-step process required for Active Directory forest recovery, including tasks like transferring key roles from an unavailable domain controller to a functioning one, which is essential for a clean recovery. These runbooks can also be used for regular testing in non-production environments to enhance cyber readiness.
• Enable fast recovery of the most important Active Directory infrastructure: Visual topology views of an organisation’s Active Directory environment enable simple and rapid identification of which domain controllers to restore first and how they should be recovered to accelerate the availability of Active Directory services.
• Accelerate recovery times and advance resilience: Manually recovering an Active Directory forest can take days or even weeks to complete, but with Commvault, organisations can recover it in a fraction of the time. Commvault’s Cloud platform integrates Active Directory forest recovery with granular recovery of both Active Directory and Entra ID, the cloud-based identity service, providing comprehensive protection.

Commvault’s innovation

“Active Directory is the heart that keeps our business functioning and in the event of a ransomware attack, recovering it will be one of our top priorities,” said Jeffrey Day, Deputy Chief Information Security Officer, Nevada Department of Transportation.

“Commvault’s innovation with Active Directory forest recovery will provide us with the confidence and peace of mind that not only can we recover our Active Directory data, but we will be able to do so quickly and accurately. And, having this offering integrated directly into the same cyber resilience platform that we use to protect mission-critical workloads is a win-win.”

Active Directory forest recovery

“Recovering Active Directory is foundational to maintaining continuous business after a cyberattack, yet traditional methods are too complex and prone to error,” said Pranay Ahlawat, Chief Technology and AI Officer, Commvault.

“With automated Active Directory forest recovery, we are giving customers game-changing recovery capabilities, and by integrating this into our unique cyber resilience platform with broad workload support, we’re bringing a new era of continuous business to our customers that nobody can match.”

Commvault's approach

“With identity-based attacks on the rise, it has never been more critical to protect Active Directory,” said Krista Case, Research Director, Futurum Group.

“Commvault's approach, which includes automated workbooks and folding Active Directory recovery into the same platform that also protects a wide range of other workloads, addresses several critical requirements we hear from practitioners, including the need to streamline security operations and to accelerate recoveries.” 

Availability and pricing

Commvault Cloud Backup & Recovery for Active Directory Enterprise Edition is targeted for general availability within the first half of 2025 and is priced per user.